AProxima-basedHaskellIDE

Date: 2008-10-16

Time: 11:45

Room: BBL room 471

Speaker: Gerbo Engels

Title: A Proxima-based Haskell IDE (thesis defense)

Abstract

Proxima is a generic presentation-oriented editor for structured documents, in which a graphical presentation of the document can be edited directly (WYSISYG editing), resulting in changes in the underlying structure of the document. Proxima understands the document structure and it supports direct edit operations on the document structure as well.

A Proxima instantiation uses a parser to get the document structure; modern compilers have parsers as well, which may be accessible through an API. Using the parser of an external compiler as the Proxima parser saves one from writing a new parser. Furthermore, the parse tree of a compiler can contain extra information that is useful to display in an editor, such as type information of a Haskell compiler in a Haskell source code editor.

We aim to use the parser of an external compiler as the Proxima parser. We identify and solve problems that arise when using the parser of an external compiler as the Proxima parser, and two Haskell editors are developed as Proxima instantiations that use the parser of GHC or EHC respectively.